A polling station opens in Westminster, London. Photo: Dominic Lipinski / PA Archive/Press Association Images. All rights reserved. The question of Electoral Reform rears its head at every Westminster election. In order to design the best electoral system, we need to ask: what is democracy? What are we trying to achieve when we ask how to do democracy best? I would argue that we are trying to achieve not simply majority rule but collective self-rule, and that proportional representation (PR) can do this much better than the first past the post (FPTP) electoral system currently used at Westminster.
FPTP has come under deserved fire because the number of MPs that a party gets under this system doesn’t tend to reflect the number of people who voted for them. A lot of support bunched together in one place carries more weight than the same amount of support spread across the UK. FPTP is, at best, made for a two-party system of forced choices. We don’t have one, and we should be happy about that, but we need another voting model to support the multi-party system we do have. Proportional representation (PR), where seats are awarded according to a party’s share of the vote, is often suggested as an alternative to FPTP. PR is more representative than FPTP, and this itself is a compelling reason to support it. However, to cast the argument purely in these terms still equates democracy with majority rule. If we adopt a more expansive vision of democracy as collective self-rule, this argument for PR does not suffice. But there are other features of PR that speak in its favour, indicating that it’s better equipped than other electoral systems to offer us the possibility of this second, more robust vision of democracy. These features may seem like obvious points - but in practice, they are often ignored.
When I say that democracy is collective self-rule, I am partly making a claim about what I think democracy should be, and about what it often spectacularly fails to be. However, this interpretation of democracy is grounded in its history. The self-rule principle, though tragically not the practice, goes back to the roots of modern democratic thinking, in the English civil war and the American revolution. It’s why there are constitutions: the point is to ensure that you’re not just doing what most people want; rather, but respecting everyone’s autonomy; thus, the constitution guarantees that some things that cannot be done to individuals even if the majority of people want them to be done. The most obvious example is the case of minority rights; a majority shouldn’t be able to vote them away. A white majority shouldn’t be able to vote to that a black minority can’t attend university.
